Alone with the Barbarians - A Variant

[kurtkage]

Alone with the Barbarians

Concept:

Your intrepid band of nomads has crossed onto a new continent over an ice bridge. The last ice age has ended, your people are beginning to settle, the land bridge has receded and your continent is cut off from the Old World.

Isolated start - with rules on living with the barbarian cities to the south.

Nothing fancy really, I've generated a random Terra map and used the worldbuilder to relocate the starting position onto the New World. I have not altered any resources or terrains except I have made a couple of tiles into coast to facilitate a canal in Central America. I've also used the WB to place a barbarian settler in South America to give them a better start at colonizing it: see the rules to follow. (I tried my best not to look at the old world continent, or the AI players which were randomly selected, or surrounding resources, as I want to play the game too!)

Restrictions:

You may not Settle any cities in South America.

You may create a "Panama Canal" in "Central America" at a site of your choosing, just don't go too far into South America =P

You may not Capture or Raze any Barbarian city in South America. (You May capture / raze barb cities in North/Central America as you see fit, that's your land).

You May Capture or Raze a Barbarian city that is under the control of an Old World AI civ, hence no longer barbarian, but still no settlers there of your own!

You May Capture or Raze a city founded by Old world AIs in South America

No "fogbusting" south america, you can explore it and fight some barbs, but remember the spirit of the variant is for the barbs to have their own land in south america until the Old world conquers them.

Settings:

Sitting Bull of the Native Americans
BTS 3.13 with Bhruics 1.11 patch
Standard size
Epic speed
Terra
High sea levels
Prince difficulty

I wasn't quite sure which difficulty to use, I know many people consider an isolated start to be difficult, however there is alot of REX time as well... I also considered putting on raging barbs, which may be better for this variant actually, but as I am not an expert player I went with prince and all settings on default.

I hope some people will be interested in playing along with me, I've been having fun with it so far. Please use spoiler tags if you are going to reveal AIs, dates, etc.

Edit: Err yea, I am not really intending on doing a walkthrough of my game. It's an open game just for fun for anyone to play on their own and discuss. Hopefully will be a fun variant, let me know if you think it's too easy / too hard / not fun and maybe I can change some things.

Edit: I'm thinking about adding more Settlers for barbs or turning on raging barbs as they do not seem to be making as many cities as I thought. Anyone know the formula that governs barbs making cities?

Thanks!

 

[KMadCandy]

my understanding is that a barb city will pop up if there X percent of the tiles are covered by fog on the map. i don't know what X is. i don't know whether it does that check every turn, i kind of think it doesn't, only every once in a while but i'm just guessing there. i do know that barbs themselves count for "uncovering fog of war" so if there's a barb axeman standing somewhere, a barb city can't show up where he is . well, that's how it worked in vanilla, where i followed along SGOTM5.

random cities are all you'll get. barbs can't actually make cities, since settlers are on the (very long) list of units / buildings in the .xml that they're forbidden from even looking at in build queues.

 

[King of Town]

I think barbarians can build settlers, but only if you are playing as the barbs. I can't rmemeber how to do that though. It always seemed like it would be cool though.

 

[MrFelony]

you can wb in some barb settlers

 

[kurtkage]

Right, I have used the worldbuilder to add a barb settler in the posted save, but now in my game I just finished liberalism and there are only 3 barbarian cities in south america. I was hoping they would fill out the continent a little better by popping cities in the fog.

That reminds me, I guess I should add no fogbusting south america to the restrictions hehe

I may try giving them more than 1 settler at the beginning and see if they manage to populate the land better.

 

[King of Town]

If you are just going to be giving them settlers, why don't you just build the city for them? They may be treating settlers like any other unit and have them fortifying a city since they technically can't build them. They may not have settler behavior coded into the game. I would just start plopping down cities.